No hate for the middle class. I can't help but enjoy the irony of people who thought they had solidarity with capital talking like Ned Ludd all of a sudden.
this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
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Middle class people are not working poor. Creatives are sometimes working poor, and other times are making $250k as UX designers.
And sometimes making minimum wage as UX designers.
Probably fall into the working poor category.
But I don’t know anyone making minimum wage doing UX.
Startups love to hire kids out of college who can do anything U, I, or X related with regards to tech. My first programming job I made minimum wage for the first few years and then got a $0.50 per hour raise before the company went out of business.
There’s FAANG and then there’s everyone else. Some jobs can be pretty bad in terms of pay. That first job also had a seasoned professional graphic designer with multiple decades of experience and she wasn’t making much more than I was.
That’s crazy. And definitely not the norm, even outside of big tech.
I’ve been in 4 startups, no one was making that little money even 20 years ago.
Yep, I've worked at tech places with bad pay but never "decades of experience and only making a little more than minimum wage". Especially if they held a Senior title. It's been a wild ride listening to their story evolve.
How seasoned could they be if they weren't able to demand a raise or work somewhere else for more as a UX Designer? How could a seasoned professional be so close to entry level, and minimum wage?
Know your worth, companies aren't just going to hand you money to be nice. Negotiate, and if they don't play ball, prove you're as good as you think you are somewhere else.
Not everyone lives in the bay area / silicon valley. Sometimes folks with tech talent live in more rural areas (or smaller college towns) and there may be only a few options around. It’s great that people have more opportunity to work from home, back then that wasn’t the case. If you did work remotely, you’d probably keep in touch on irc or icq and you’d periodically have a GoToMeeting or a WebEx conference (Zoom wasn’t a thing).
Also, skill level does not equal pay level. We don’t actually live in a meritocracy.
Some of us have been working remote since way before Covid.
Skill level doesn't equal pay level directly, but if you have decades of experience in a technical field like UX Design and are still making close to minimum wage in the USA, that does sound like a skill issue.
Again, my guy we do not live in a meritocracy. If the businesses in your local area aren’t hiring UX (well at that time, they were just called “graphic designers” though they did UX work, we hadn’t defined UX as an industry at this time), then you don’t get a job, regardless of skill level.
You ignored the fact that myself and many others were working remote many years ago. Even using the old project middleman websites would have made more than minimum wage.
Why was moving impossible? Programming is full of foreign nationals who left their family, culture, languages, etc to try and make a better life for themselves but we can't move to a different city and try?
Decades of UX Design experience, near minimum wage...
Victim Mentality
I didn’t actually. I mentioned GotoMeeting, WebEx and IRC as methods for ways to work remotely, but not things like github (because it wasn’t around). Sure, CVS was around, but not Mercurial or git. Everyone wanted to own a blazing fast T1 connection… Around the year 2000. I’m sure there were people working remotely because that was technically possible, but it wasn’t something everyone had access to.
Well for me I just graduated high school so I didn’t have the money to move yet. When I could afford it, I did move - to a HCOL area which didn’t pay well. I helped multiple startups and yeah, probably wasn’t paid what I was worth but then again few people actualy are.
For the person seasoned web designer (well, to be clear they were senior web designer, having worked as a web designer for multple years. I’m not sure how many years, but considering the web was invented in 1989, it couldn’t have been more than 11, though I think they was working as a graphic or digital designer prior to that.
You ok there kiddo? You seem to be harboring a lot of animosity on this subject. Yeah, I mean I can’t remember exactly the circumstances and I didn’t look outside the job market for my first real job in my industry which I got out of high school so I can’t speak to what the next biggest city was doing in terms of web dev agencies or other tech companies sprouting up. I think this was during the dotcom bubble so maybe I should’ve just predicted the future and up and moved myself and all the employees at the local web dev agency to silicon valley and got some of that sweet VC money. It worked out well for everyone involved, as I understand it.
First it was "decades of experience" now it's "maybe 11 years" those are big differences.
I never mentioned silicon valley or VC bubbles, no one can predict the future. But if someone with decades of experience as you put it was making nearly minimum wage, they should have at least tried commuting or moving to their nearest Metropolitan area. "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas!"
Yeah, so I don’t think I need to explain to you how time works but maybe I should clarify. We’re talking about a few different people and we’re talking about multiple points in time. All while I’m trying to anonymize the story so that I don’t get doxxed.
I was hired at a local web dev company around the year 2000. At this time, I had just graduated high school. I was working as a “web developer” which in modern day parlance means I’m doing the role of a full stack web developer. Keep in mind at this time javascript was pretty new and so there wasn’t a need to split between front and backend. That’s me though, I didn’t have the experience back then.
However, during that time, (the year 2000) at that same company was a person who had been working in the graphic design industry for most of her life. She was older than me, I think a grandmother at that time.
Now, the web itself was invented by CERN in 1989, so absolutely zero web designers existed (as a job title) prior to 1989. The people who became web designers were already working with some form of graphic design on digital media / computer-based graphic design. At a certain point (I’m not this person and I’m not an actual historian so I don’t know the date) in the past, prior to 1989, there were no such thing as computer based graphic artists, since no software existed to create computer graphics. The people who became graphic designers working with computer-based graphic design were artists, illustrators and designers working with physical media. Etc…
This is why I say someone (in the year 2000) was doing the work of building user experiences with decades of experience in their industry. In a meritocracy, this person would’ve been one of the more skilled web designers around and indeed they were and the firm was lucky to have hired them. The computer doesn’t make the UX happen, the people who have been studying and practicing design for years make it happen. That relevant graphic design experience doesn’t go away just because new technology comes out.
You may have been confused or I may have mistyped. I don’t know this person’s salary, but I know mine. I was paid minimum wage, and only ever got a $0.50 / hour raise. This company would also have their paychecks bounce and eventually went out of business. It’s entirely possible the senior web designer made a lot of money but from the sounds of it this was not the case.
My entire point here is you seem to be mistaken on the following:
My issue for a lot of my life was earnestly thinking that my loyalty to a company meant anything. I know better now. The larger part is that though I’m now making closer to what I probably should have been years ago (since I’ve been working as a full stack dev since 2000), but it’s still going to take me a bit to build up a buffer so I can feel confident losing my job for a few months while i find a new one. It seems to take about 3-6 months to find a new tech job, and that’s just how these things work these days. And now that tech firms are salivating at AI and we’re seeing more layoffs, I’m not entirely sure what the future holds.
One thing is for sure though, we aren’t living in a meritocracy. If we were, this conversation wouldn’t be happening because everyone at that company back in 2000 would have been paid what they were worth, and that company would have succeeded. In fact the one thing I learned from businesses is the best way to have a business succeed is to hire someone who has strong connections to people with deep pockets.
I'm not confused, you wrote the following:
You claimed to know at least an approximation of their salary with decades of experience, which was not much more than yours was, at minimum wage + $0.50. That's ridiculous if true. Even if they only had 11 actual years of web experience + the other years in other related design pre-internet.
You keep changing your history and points to fit your narrative. I understand anonymizing things but you're making specific claims then saying you don't know when called out.
Yes, well sometimes coworkers talk. Salary numbers may have been mentioned but I can’t remember. What I do remember is that they had another job at the time teaching web design, that they relied on medical insurance when they had an accident only to discover that the company had not been paying their insurance premium. It was around that time that I was terminated, so I didn’t keep in touch with them much after that. Suffice it to say, this company didn’t have enough money to meet payroll each month and it meant one employee would have a bounced paycheck - whomever got to the bank to cash it last.
Yes, it was ridiculous and true. Jobs in this town were slim for this talent and by and large, no companies at that time were hiring for remote work, despite it being technically possible as we were all working on the web itself.
I really don’t though. I’ve been very consistent throughout this conversation. I find it funny that you think you’ve “got me” when I’ve literally experienced this myself. I could prove all of this to you but it would cost me my and their anominimty and this convo isn’t worth it just to prove to you that YES, sometimes people (even professionals with lots of experience) end up in shitty situations.
I’m really surprised you need a conversation this detailed and need to backcheck every detail of my story just to understand that point.
But by all means, continue to do so if you really care. Just know that things aren’t going to match up 100% due to trying to recall things from memory of 23-24 or so years ago. Things which aren’t really needed as the story of people making a little bit of money in their first job and then going on to make more money in other jobs is a story that I don’t really think needs to be explained in vivid detail.
Then why say this at the start of your comment thread?
Either you knew their rough salary, or can't remember. Which was it?
I know some people making six figures with second jobs, especially if they're teaching in their field or live in a high COL area. It doesn't mean they make "minimum wage" but maybe they live paycheck to paycheck. Those are very, very different.
Sorry. The exact salary amount doesn’t matter in this case, because I know enough about their situation (which I won’t be disclosing to you) to do a rough estimate based on their quality of life and from the information they’ve given me.
FFS man, chill out. Save this energy for when you’re debating some right-wing lunatic trying to push bullshit narratives.
I can’t remember lots of things. Hence my name, Dipshit. I’m a dumb pile of shit with ADHD. I’ve had a lot of conversations over the years and I don’t remember everything from them. What got encoded in my dumb little memory was that they weren’t making much more than me.
But shit man, what you’re not seeming to understand here is that:
minimum wage x full time work ~= $A
this person’s salary at this job + this person’s salary at thier other job ~= $B
$A and $B are not very far off. Functionally, they are the same when compared to $C, what either of our salaries should’ve been, even with me being fresh out of high school, but still having a few projects under my belt.
If you don’t accept it, don’t accept it. It’s one example out of many that people can provide. I don’t really have a desire to continue trying to anonymize parts of my employment history to you in an effort to convince some stranger that the things I know happened happened.
The real conversation here which I’m trying to have with you once you stop nitpicking on my personal back story (in an effort to dox me I assume because this is getting a little much, don’t you think?) is why are you so flabbergasted by this concept?
Are you familar with the idea that people can be paid less money than what they are worth? Do you know how capitalism works? Do you understand that there will be winners and losers and because we don’t live in a meritocracy, who gets to be winners and who gets to be losers largely comes from chance?
Your entire point seems to be on disproving my experience, I assume because then that would mean that in your head your argument is sound, that everyone is paid what they are worth, and that it was just a “skill issue” from someone with “victim mentality” (both your phrases) why someone wouldn’t be paid what they are worth.
What’s your point?
That’s a good thing I didn’t say they were making minimum wage. Look, throwing out some numbers here randomly (small numbers since it’s going to be easier to calculate and I am a dipshit):
hypothetical minimum wage $10/hour. 40hr / week that’s $400/week. x 4 weeks in a month that’s $1600/month. After taxes (let’s say half - what’s advised for sole proprietors anyway - for ease of math) that’s $800/month.
This person was making salary at their teaching job so that’s $X, but what I’m saying is that the web dev agency which hired them paid them $Y. I don’t know if $X == $Y and also was married with a husband with salary $Z, but I do know that $X + $Y + $Z <= COL for that area.
This tells me that both myself and them were having trouble making ends meet in the same area. That area was a relatively low cost of living area as well. I’m no economist but i would estimate that salary ranges (in the pre-remote work boom) in an area vary depending on the COL, meaning that low cost of living area salaries may be something like fulltime work at minimum wage for a year * 2 or maybe * 3, but HCOL area salaries may be something like fulltime work at minimum wage for a year * 5 or * 10. These opinions are my own and may be very wrong but they just seem to be what I have experienced at least back then. Now with remote work it’s hard to say since high earners can move to rural areas and work for companies in HCOL areas.
I didn’t think I’d be talking to someone who’s going to try to pull apart my anonymized story to look for defects to try to win an argument. My previous answers reflect the person I once was prior to this conversation going down such a deep and personal rabbit hole.